Applications, e.g. games, in wireless communication devices have developed over the years so that it is possible to download additional content stored in an external memory through a communication network. Downloadable data file can comprise, for example in games, additional levels or new characters. In this description the term data refers to a content which can be downloaded from the network and be processed in the terminal and which is defined by a media type, preferably by MIME-type. Also this description is limited to the game data processing, but the processing method according to the invention is also adaptable to the other application areas.
It will be evident to the person skilled in the art, that additional data is mainly stored in the server or in another memory device outside of the wireless device, which reduces the load of the wireless device's memory. Being able to download the additional data to his own terminal, the user has to have a data transmission connection with said external memory device, which stores said data to be selected by the user and transmitted to his terminal. Game content will be saved into the memory of the terminal in binary format and the content-specific application performs needed functions for presenting the content data in its actual form to the user, for example on the display of the terminal.
In data transmission, the recognition of the data content is based on the MIME-type (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). MIME-type describes the media type of the data transmitted through the communication network. Each new MIME-type must be registered in the Application Information File (AIF), which stores all the application-supported MIME-types and a priority value defined for each MIME-type. Priority value defines the application, which is primarily used by the data with the MIME-type in question. In some environments each MIME-type has its own recognizer for defining the content. Content recognition is needed for directing the data being attached to the actual application.
For the reason that each game is an independent application, the game data should be registered with its own MIME-type according to the prior art. Due to this, every application must provide MIME-type handling by itself. Because games are the most favorite applications in the wireless communication arena the registration and handling of each data content requires too much work by and memory capacity of the wireless device.